Delivering the Promise   1      2      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> It took me a number of months to digest this conversation. I was reluctant to revise my views— adopted wholesale from Leach and Yanagi—about hand versus the machine and the subconscious versus the self-conscious. I realized, though, that Yagi had raised the stakes on me. He forced me to wrestle with what it meant to be a potter at a time in history when handmade pottery was being replaced at the practical, everyday level by plastics. He made me realize that there was no room for mediocre handmade pottery—even if you still drink out of it. I had started making pottery because it moved me and spoke to me, in a way no other Art form did, about what it meant to be human. Now Yagi was making me live up to my responsibility as an artist. He did not try, like teachers in the United States, to convince me that the answer was to abandon pottery and turn to sculpture. He urged me instead to find what made us respond so strongly to pottery—even bad pottery—and then to use that locus as a point of departure for the expression of my own ideas. He made me examine and question my work for false sentiment, reckless bravado and self-conscious affectation, and to look deeper for answers to my questions about the meaning and importance of pottery and its place in the modern world.

It is impossible to measure the debt I owe Yagi for holding me to such exacting standards. I went to Japan imagining that I would find a demanding teacher who would have me making hundreds of teacups every day for months before he found one that satisfied his specific ideas of what a teacup should look like. Instead, I found a teacher who made me think about what a teacup was and what kind of meaning it could carry.
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